Baby farms: A new kind of sex trafficking

Inside the horrifying trade exploiting Vietnamese women for their bodies

By Samantha Dick

Abandoned by her husband with a young son to feed on her own, Linh* was desperate.

Her family in a remote Vietnamese village had never had much money, and after a "very difficult" marriage to a local man ended in divorce, Linh fell deeper into poverty.

She needed a way out.

When an older woman approached her on social media, she was relieved to have found a companion. After one month of exchanging messages online, the woman offered her a job in China.

"As a single mother, I was desperate to earn money to look after my son and my family," Linh told The New Daily.

"I was really confident that the job opportunity was legitimate."

Linh was 21 years old when she was taken to China to begin her new job.

Bundled into a vehicle driven by strangers, she spent hours bumping along more than 1200km of winding, rural roads through rugged mountains over the Chinese border.

When the vehicle eventually stopped outside an apartment building, Linh realised she had been tricked.

She was locked inside a room packed with a group of pregnant Vietnamese women.

"Most had been tricked ... in the same way that I had," Linh said.

"All had been raped for the purpose of becoming pregnant."

Linh said none of the women knew what would happen to them after they had given birth. All they knew was that their babies would be taken from them and sold.

"I didn't know at the time, but I now know that girl babies were being sold for $9000 and boys for $13,000," she said.

In China's patriarchal culture, most parents prefer to have sons over daughters because it is a lot easier for men to earn more money for the family.

When a Chinese woman gets married, she moves in with her husband and his family – leaving her parents to support themselves into old age.

In extreme cases, due to a combination of government policy and cultural preferences, the desire to bear a son is so strong that some parents deliberately kill newborn girls until the mother eventually gives birth to a boy.

Today, China's gender imbalance is notable. In a population of 1.4 billion, men outnumber women by about 34 million.

During Linh's enslavement in China, she was impregnated via artificial insemination.

"I was kept locked inside a room while the traffickers waited for our babies to grow," Linh told The New Daily.

"There were some medical staff and gangster-type people who would care for us. They let us have a smart phone with no SIM card so we could play games and entertain ourselves."

When Linh was six months pregnant, she figured out how to access nearby WiFi and sent a message to her family begging for help.

Her family immediately notified the police in Vietnam, which connected them to Blue Dragon Children's Foundation, a charity founded by Australian man Michael Brosowski that rescues Vietnamese sex slaves and children living in poverty.

Mr Brosowski told The New Daily his team had engineered hundreds of "escape plans" that have saved more than 800 victims of human trafficking since 2005.

Of those, 48 per cent were aged under 18.

Many were sold for a range of purposes, with more than 300 rescued from sweatshops in Ho Chi Minh City and 101 from gold mines, farms and labour trafficking in Vietnam and China.

So far, Blue Dragon has rescued more than 440 young women from forced marriage, surrogacy or brothels.

Not long after Linh was returned home to her family in Vietnam, she gave birth to a baby boy.

But the trouble didn't stop there.

"When I was rescued, the traffickers started threatening my family and I a lot," Linh said.

"They sent out a bounty on me that (said) if anyone finds me, there will be a reward of 50 million Vietnamese dong ($3190)."

A Chinese man managed to track down Linh's family, claiming it was his sperm that had impregnated her and that her newborn son belonged to him.

He said he had also been tricked by the sex traffickers and that he was "very upset" by the whole ordeal.

Mr Brosowski said some of the men who had been caught up in human trafficking rings were led to believe the women had consented to being surrogates.

The self-proclaimed sperm donor begged Linh to hand over her baby and offered a decent sum of money, but she wouldn't accept it.

Linh said she knew she couldn't raise her newborn baby as well as her four-year-old son from her previous marriage all by herself.

"I only wanted the best for the child and I knew I couldn't raise the child (on my own)," she said.

"I knew they would love him and take care of him. The baby was three months old when I gave him to 'the father'."

Today, Linh works in a shrimp processing factory, where she still struggles to make ends meet but manages to raise her four-year-old son.

*Linh is not her real name.

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